Don't Mess With Jess

Jessica Alba is engaged, pregnant, and more gorgeous than ever

I'm reading this dumb book, and it's getting in my head," Jessica Alba says, as she digs through her giant studded Gerard Darel bag and pulls out a white hardcover buried among the bottles of acidophilus and chlorella supplements that have been rattling around in there for about a month, since she embarked on a new no caffeine or booze, endless glasses of water, truckloads of fruits and vegetables regimen. "I was so nauseous reading this while I was on the bike today," she says. What emerges is Skinny Bitch, the pro-vegan diatribe masquerading as a chick-lit diet book that became an instant best-seller when Victoria Beckham was photographed carrying it. As Alba reads from the chapter concerning slaughterhouses, it's clear why seared loins haven't quite tasted so succulent since her trainer Ramona gave her the book. "Stunned or not," she reads, "cows and hogs are then 'strung up' from the ceiling by a chain attached to their legs. In theory, while they dangle there, they are supposed to be unconscious. But often they are fully conscious, struggling, screaming, and fearfully staring at the workers while they have their throats stabbed open." Alba peers up at me, mouth agape, then buries her nose in the book and describes the work of the wretched souls whose résumés include the words head skinner.

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It's worth noting that Alba and I are not taking a break from picketing a Hormel plant, but sitting in the back of Sur La Table, the gourmet kitchenware store, near the Farmers Market in Los Angeles. We've just completed a private class in Mediterranean cooking, and those tender lamb kebabs dipped in pomegranate sauce sitting in our bellies are now conjuring visions of a woolly creature rolling around a pasture in a wheelchair. Even that cornmeal olive-oil cake with calvados-sautéed apples had milk, which, the Skinny Bitch authors remind us, contains traces of rocket fuel and udder pus. But Alba resides in a pragmatic world. When it came down to it, however cruel and toxic the meal, she did exactly what was expected with a writer and cooking teacher eyeballing her: She ate the goddamn food, and even managed to pronounce it "delicious."

Alba has for some time been publicly chafing at her image as a staggeringly beautiful girl who lands atop any poll that measures men's arousal but has never attracted critical adulation for her acting. And the choked-down meal suggests what it might have felt like for her, a 12-year show business veteran, to stand on a stage last August next to pubescent High School Musical star Zac Efron and appear truly psyched to accept an unwieldy surfboard for being voted "Teen Choice Female Hottie of the Year." A friend of mine related a story about watching Alba at ShoWest, the annual Las Vegas schmooze-fest for movie theater owners, where she was promoting Fantastic Four. Alba, who posed for picture after picture with a long line of schlubby exhibitors, would beam as the flashbulb went off, and when the theater owner was lead away, her face would fall into a look of misery. As soon as the next guy was in place, she'd be ready with another electric smile.

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"Jessica is very strategic in the way she approaches her career," says John Stockwell, who directed her in 2005's Into the Blue. "She's not a bubble-headed Maxim bikini babe. Look, she understands you have to do certain things to get to certain places, and when she's had enough of it, she'll use that position of being on those hot lists to get to a different level."

Her body has served her perhaps too well. "Jessica will have to do something like what Charlize Theron did with Monster in order to get people to pay attention to what a good actor she is," says Stockwell, who for Into the Blue shot Alba and costar Paul Walker in swimwear for three months. "Executives at MGM could barely focus on what was happening on the screen because they were so distracted by how good she looked in a bikini. I would literally get notes saying, 'Hey, why did you cut that one shot of Jessica swimming by?'" Walker seems to have been similarly taken when he told a reporter in 2006 that "I couldn't take my eyes off that ass. I'm sorry. She's beautiful" and went on to describe Alba not as the consummate actress, but rather as "the kind of girl you want to have angry sex with for the rest of your life." Nice.

Jessica Alba is lost on the streets of Beverly Hills. It's after lunch, and she's already late to a fitting at Bally to be dressed for a private dinner she's agreed to host the following night celebrating the company's new creative director, Brian Atwood. (She's returning the favor for all the free loot the company has sent to her.) At the store, wherever it is, await her stylist, her trainer, a Bally publicist, and the publicist for the party. But someone has given Alba the store's address as 340 Canon, so back and forth we walk, past 338, past 350, and back again, Alba's sandals slapping the hot pavement, a large portion of her face hidden behind a gigantic pair of Michael Kors shades. "Where the hell is 340?" she says, looking up at the buildings. We walk into a dark little mall off the street, where outside of the Giuseppe Franco Salon stands grizzled onetime child star Corey Feldman, smoking a cigarette in a salon robe, sporting what appears to be a head wet with hair dye. Feldman silently watches Alba, but she doesn't look over, conveniently busy on her phone with her publicist, who informs her the store's actually on Rodeo Drive, not Canon.

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"When I first started going to acting classes when I was 11, he used to hang out at a restaurant down here," she says about Feldman, once we're out of earshot. "My mom was always like, `You should go up and talk to him.' I was like, `Mom! It's embarrassing. What am I going to say?' "

It's clear how much Hollywood fortunes have realigned once Alba starts heading to her car, parked two blocks away. As if a silent alarm has gone off, photographers emerge from nowhere, first one, then two, then a woman lugging a bulky video camera that looks like it was made in 1988, and by the time we reach Alba's gray Prius, six paparazzi are walking backward in front of her. She keeps her head down, her car key held aloft in front of her face. Apart from the clicking, it's an oddly silent ritual on the otherwise deserted streets, with curious shopkeepers pressing their faces against windows as we pass, like bit players in a Western showdown scene.

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"Beverly Hills is awesome," Alba snarls once she is safely inside the car. "Fuckers! They do this to me every day. And every day there's no story. I'm not doing drugs. I'm not running over people. I'm not going to clubs. I'm not dating anyone famous. I'm not doing anything interesting! I don't get it. I'm the most boring chick ever." Though there's nothing boring about the illegal right turn she makes from the middle lane to the honking consternation of the Mercedes driver who nearly plows into her, she actually has a point. With some young actresses, you suspect that at the same time they complain about paparazzi, they're texting their whereabouts to a favored lensman. Alba sees keeping a tight control of her image as a business decision. "If I'm out with my friends having a drink, I don't need that to be headlines," she says. "I need the movies I'm in and the premieres I'm at to be headlines."

This reticence has provided its own headaches. Lately, Perez Hilton, the Cuban-American blogger, has waged a racially freighted publicity campaign against Alba. Using quotes cherry-picked from past interviews that together seem to suggest she isn't proud of her father's Mexican-American roots, Hilton has turned the actress into a punching bag, regularly referring to her as Jessica "Don't Call Me Latina" Alba. According to Alba, the sniping began because of something far more banal than Hilton suddenly morphing into a pink-haired Cesar Chavez. "It was all because I wouldn't take photos with him at a nightclub," she says. "It would probably be smart for me to hang out and kiss up to what's his name, Perez...." So, is she proud of her Latin roots? "Of course I'm proud of my heritage!" she says. "That's all I know! I don't even know my mom's side of the family. I only know a Mexican-American upbringing."

Alb's upbringing does not make her an easy fit in the stereotypical Hispanic-actress slot of, say, Rosie Perez, with her hardscrabble background and thick Brooklyn accent. When she was young, Alba and her parents did live with her paternal grandparents in their house in La Verne, California, but her grandparents were there just half the week, and only because the country club where they played golf was nearby. They spent the rest of the week in their Palm Springs house, and her grandfather, Joe, who had retired comfortably as a VP for a manufacturing company, also owned four other houses. Alba's father, Mark, had grown up in an all-white suburb, in a house in which Spanish was not spoken because his parents wanted their five children to assimilate. Alba's mother, Catherine, is white—strawberry blond and freckled, in fact—and looked so different from Jessica and her younger brother, Josh, that neighbors in the primarily white town initially thought her mom was the family's nanny.

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Identity and solitude seem to be central themes in Alba's early life. Before her parents, who had married as teens, settled in La Verne, and her dad went back to business school and eventually started a mortgage and real estate company, Mark had been in the Air Force; Alba went to 11 different schools before turning 12. In public school in Del Rio, Texas, Alba says that she was put into a bilingual class because of the brownish tint of her skin and stayed there for three weeks before anybody got the picture that she didn't speak a word of Spanish. She says she was sickly—asthma, kidney problems—and ugly, bucktoothed, and swaybacked. She also says that she was friendless and talks bitterly of the clique of middle school girls who kicked dirt on her while she was eating a sandwich under a tree, only to come back and invite her to eat with them after seeing her photos in Seventeen. Alba decided at a young age that she wanted a life very different from her parents'. "When I go to Mexico, I want to go to see the pyramids, to learn about the history," she says. "My parents want to go to Señor Frog's every day." (Apparently mother and daughter had a rare aesthetic meeting of the minds when Alba was 18 and they got matching ladybug tattoos on the backs of their necks.)

As assimilated as Alba's upbringing was, she never felt there was a well-defined place for her in Hollywood. "Nobody really knew what to do with me," she says. "Everyone wants to categorize you and pigeonhole you. I'm half Latin, but I grew up in the States, and I can't get roles playing a Latina because I don't speak Spanish. And I didn't want to be the best friend, or the promiscuous girl, or the maid, because those stereotypes still exist with Latin roles. I wanted to be a leading lady. And I thought that because I have brown skin shouldn't make any difference. Why should only Aryan-looking girls be that girl?" Really, I say, your skin color has hindered you that much?

To her father's chagrin, Alba decided at 12 to be an actress, got an agent, and booked parts on a couple after-school specials and a guest spot on Chicago Hope (as a girl with—don't ask—gonorrhea of the throat). In 1994, she got her first big break and packed off for Australia to costar in an updated Flipper, which, in a harbinger of roles to come, featured her in a bathing suit sharing scenes with actors paid only in fish. That year, she was also born again and, following the tenets of the Calvary Chapel, swore off secular music and TV and logged many hours weeping for salvation with other teenagers. Though she fell out with the church—the summer she spent in Vermont at 16 studying at David Mamet and William Macy's Atlantic Theater Company acting school, spending her days reciting a lot of scripted F-bombs and her nights dancing at a local gay club with a transvestite ballerina pretty much ended that chapter—she did hold on to her chastity until she was 18 and starring in her own prime-time show on Fox.

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The James Cameron–produced Dark Angel, in which she played Max Guevara, the supercharged ass-kicker with a pinch of feline DNA, made her famous. She shared more than just craft-service meals with her costar, Michael Weatherly, an actor 13 years her senior with a son from a previous marriage. "He was my first love," she says. "The way I grew up was that you marry the first person you have sex with. That's the way
everyone in my family is." Though she won't discuss the aborted engagement, she does unleash the eye roll when I mention how much time Weatherly spent discoursing on how his hair looked during the DVD commentary the couple recorded for the show. "Fuckin' actors, man," she sighs. "No more actors. I like to work with them, but I don't need to be in a relationship with one." Director's assistants, however, are apparently acceptable; she's been dating Cash Warren (who held that job on Fantastic Four), the Yale-educated son of Michael Warren, who played Bobby Hill on Hill Street Blues.

Apart from declaring "I'm madly in love," Alba keeps mum about Warren and the pregnancy that People would report six weeks later. (Just after the cat squirms out of the bag, Alba e-mails: "I come from a huge family and I'm the oldest of 15 cousins, so I've known I wanted kids. I'm ready to be a mom, and it's a really happy time for us and our families.") But when talking about her movies, she often sounds like a woman who thought she'd met the perfect guy, only to walk in on him wearing a dress and dousing her living room with gasoline. Of Dark Angel, which saw a radical shift in tone after the first season, she says, "Fox decided there needed to be lots of mutants running around, and I needed to be dating a bunch of guys. The show went to hell in a hand-basket, and I still had my face plastered all over the place." She signed onto Into the Blue to play a brainy marine biology student, and last-minute script changes turned her character into Walker's bikini-clad trophy girlfriend. "I just thought it was dumbed down for no reason," she says. (She also notes that she alone hustled for the movie: "Paul was the lead, Paul helped develop it. You wouldn't believe how much that kid got paid! And I don't think he did one ounce of publicity.")

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As for Good Luck Chuck, she says, "It's porn! It wasn't supposed to be like that." She described the 30-day shoot as a "boy's set," where every day the crew—and Dane Cook—would finish up by filming two sex scenes. "There were all these actresses who got conned into being completely naked," she says. "Some were strippers, probably. But every day when I was done, I ran away. I was like, `Bye.' As long as they didn't disrespect me, I could give a rat's butt."

She may have kept her self-respect, but some crave her to appear in films that will showcase her talent. Sin City's Frank Miller, for one, hopes to make her innocent stripper a larger role in the long-gestating sequel, written expressly for the intense actress—"dark Jessica" he calls her—he's come to know. "Overnight, she's turned into America's sweetheart in roles that I personally found ridiculously limiting," Miller says. "I know the woman. She's no Donna Reed. If I get to work with her again, I want to show off what she can do. I'm not interested in removing her top. I'm interested in unveiling her talent." This month, Alba stars as a blind violinist in a remake of the Asian horror film The Eye. She's proud of her work in it, though horror-movie bloggers haven't been particularly sanguine about its prospects.

Alba is well aware that haters abound. Before interviewing her, I flip open Los Angeles Magazine to a quote from radio host Adam Carolla: "I just think Jessica Alba is vapid. I've never heard her say anything smart. Every time I ask, `Why is Jessica Alba such a big star?' guys go, `Dude, have you seen how hot she is?' " A week after we meet, the New York Post reports that Alba is being courted to star on Broadway, reprising a role that Madonna originated in 1988 to mixed reviews in David Mamet's Speed the Plow. To cast Alba, who has never appeared onstage before, as Karen, the studio temp who could be construed as just another sexy show business mercenary trying to sleep her way to the top, would be provocative. (And yes, there's the minor issue of a big old pregnant lady playing the ingenue.) But this isn't the reason she offers for dragging her feet. New York is rarely kind to carpetbagging movie stars. Two years later, Julia Roberts must still be holding her gut from her critical evisceration in Three Days of Rain.

"Whether I do a good job or not, people will be nasty," Alba says. "Even Claire Danes, who's a respected actress, got shit [for Pygmalion]. I don't know if I feel like being ridiculed like that." But Alba doesn't hesitate when asked if she wonders if she's up to the job. She says coolly, "I know I can kill it."

So she didn't do all those self-deprecating bits as host of the 2006 MTV Movie Awards just for the fun of it? Nope. "I couldn't get seen for a comedy to save my life," Alba says. She took the gig to show the industry that she could be funny. And largely because of that onstage goofing, Dane Cook, sitting in the audience, chose her to play his clumsy inamorata in last year's Good Luck Chuck, which, considering the critical excoriation the film received, might seem like a wash, or worse, for Alba—that is, until you consider the bigger picture. "I saw her interviewed and saw a silly freeness," Mike Myers says. "Then when I saw the Good Luck Chuck trailers, that confirmed my initial thought that she'd be funny."; And now she is playing the owner of a cursed hockey team in Myers' big summer tent pole, The Love Guru, which Alba predicts will be a new Austin Powers-scale franchise.

The day before our cooking class, at lunch in Beverly Hills, Alba's eyes almost roll out of her head when the subject of the Teen Choice award comes up. Of meeting Efron, she says, "He looks like a child with a lot of makeup. I was like, 'My God, you're just a little kid.' Alba, however, will be 27 in April, a milestone she seems to be approaching with all the enthusiasm of a cat being ushered through the gates of a water park. "I'm anticipating it," she says lugubriously. "I'm feeling old, yes...27 was when Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison all died." It doesn't take long to notice just how far Alba is from the seductress you would suspect her to be after sampling the Internet's vast collection of her cheesecake shots. (How much gravitas can any woman muster in a bikini?) Add to that all those profiles in men's magazines depicting her as an expert flirt about one glass of cabernet away from jumping the writers' bones.

Over lunch, the vibe she gives off is a lot more sober CEO than purring sex kitten. "I think there are ambitious girls who will do anything to be famous, and they think men in this business are used to women doing that," Alba says. "Contrary to how people may feel, I've never used my sexuality. That's not part of it for me. When I'm in a meeting, I want to tell you why I'm an asset, how I'm a commodity, how I can put asses in the seats, not, 'There's a chance you're going to be able to fuck me.' That's never been my deal." To illustrate, she mentions a conversation she had with Frank Miller, the graphic novelist and co-director of 2005's Sin City, in which she played the stripper Nancy Callahan, who, thanks to a firm no-nudity clause in Alba's contract, never doffs her studded leather bra. "It wasn't even something I was at all aware of before Frank pointed that out. He said, 'You never use your sexuality at all. You never even throw that card in the mix. You're the only actress I've ever met who doesn't do that.'"

But she certainly has a ready arsenal of sex appeal at her disposal, even if she chooses not to engage it. She's wearing a black slip dress on this 90-plus-degree October day, because, she says with characteristic bluntness, "It's hot as balls outside." Photos can't begin to replicate what it's like to be in close proximity to her full upper lip, which got her teased as a kid but helped land her on the pages of Seventeen at age 12. To behold that lip's grandeur is to finally understand the ideal those aging actresses are pursuing when they collagen themselves to the point of resembling trout. Though she describes her body as "relatable" to regular women —comparing her own curves to those of Halle Berry, Beyoncé, and Jennifer Lopez—Alba is definitively slight; her lithe, twiggy arms and long, slender fingers making her more serpentine than bodacious.